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Could targeting 2 geographic locations decrease rankings?

I think that us targeting 2 different geographic locations (San Francisco, CA and Salt Lake City, UT) is negatively effecting the rank of some of our main keywords.

My evidence for this:

Since December our main keyword (NLP) dropped in ranking for nlpca(dot)com from about 19th to about 40th. This is about when we started to really target 2 different locations. Other main keywords dropped a lot as well, like the important term "NLP Training"

The other day we bolded a sentence with the words "Salt Lake City, Utah" at the top of our content and in one of Google's Databases (the one I was looking at) we dropped in rankings for "NLP California" where we used to be completely sitelinked (where we took up a lot of space at the top of the search). Also, we shot up to 1st on my datacenter for both "NLP Utah" and "NLP Salt Lake City". At the same time, our rankings for the term "NLP" dropped off the map. It has come back up, but we've also targeted California again.

A lot of our anchor text has the word "California" in it.

We're thinking about building a separate site for Utah and just linking to it from the California website when we need to.

Does it sound to you, in your experience, that targeting both locations in our case is what's causing a decrease in rankings?

6 Responses

As promised, I ran this past a few colleagues. As I expected, the response was "correlation is not causation". Unless the Local SEO on your site or on local business indexes was mishandled, it seems unlikely that your targeting your second location is responsible for the ranking drop you observed. Now, if Google got mixed up about your addresses, that could cause a problem, but provided you've handled your Local SEO correctly, this is probably not the culprit.

Sorry if that wasn't clear. I think I need more information. When you say you are targeting Salt Lake City and San Francisco, do you mean that you have offices in those two cities and are doing a true local campaign for the cities (optimizing the site for them + getting Google Place Pages, other local business index listings, etc.)?

Or, is your service virtual and you are just targeting cities with your content only?

If the former, then if the Local SEO is not handled correctly, Google can get confused as to why you've got two distinct addresses. In such a case, they may lose 'faith' in the validity of their data about you and that could, potentially, cause a drop,

I have not encountered any studies or evidence to indicate that adding a second location would cause a ranking drop of the original location - though, of course, you have in a sense split your KWs in half by doubling them (adding Utah).

I'd like to ask a few of my Local SEO colleagues for any feedback on this in case anyone can point to a similar case. I'll be back.

One factor that seems to have quite a bit to do with geographical rankings is the actual popularity of that geographical region. Larger more metro areas have more people more people searching & are harder to rank in then smaller places with fewer people thus fewer people searching.

I can cobble a site that ranks top 3 for Daly City Photography in a day or so.

Yet if I create the same site for San Francisco Photography.

That will be a much harder set of keywords to rank for since Daly City is so small & has so fewer people using that phrase VS San Francisco.

Hundreds of factors determine your rankings. I don't think you can point to creating a second geographic location and say that was what tanked your SERPs. For all you know google could be saying... wow! these guys have two locations now, they must be successful... but other factors tanked the rankings.

Would I build a second site for a second location? Only if the service was completely different... Like if I had a beer joint in Utah and a knitting club in California.

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